contributors are not consistently ordered by family name

[TallTed]

Originally posted by @TallTed and replied to by @gkellogg and @TallTed, in w3c/sparql-update#50 (comment)

Note that this does not "do the right thing" for Jose Emilio Labra Gayo, though I see that by some other magic the sort-order is correctly based on the third component.

It's unclear to me whether Thomas Pellissier Tanon should be ordered under P or T. (Different sources show both Pellissier Tanon and Tanon are treated as his family name.) Perhaps @Tpt could weigh in? Likewise Jeffrey Phillips Freeman. Thoughts, @freemo (assuming I've found the right GitHub user)?

It's an approximation, and beyond the scope of this work to handle all variations in how names are represented (is there even a way to know algorithmically?). In any case, the result is just whitespace in HTML which is eliminated when rendering. As the list is generated automatically, the need to be able to easily inspect the HTML list of people is of limited value.

"the list is generated automatically" and that's problematic, as I've stated (I thought, clearly).

If ordered by family name, there must be a way to detect what portion of the namestring is the family name.

If there isn't an easy way that can be applied to the output of the magic script/function, then the authors of that magic script/function ought to be looking at an issue report, by whatever means possible.

I really wish the specifics of this PR had been worked out on one document, and not applied across the board until after issues such as this had been resolved there.

[gkellogg]

The participants are ordered by the W3C, I believe using the Family Name from each user record associated with the group (now including past members). This yield the following:

      Vladimir Alexiev,
          Amin Anjomshoaa,
        Julián Arenas-Guerrero,
        Dörthe Arndt,
         Bilal Ben Mahria,
         Erich Bremer,
           Dan Brickley,
          Kurt Cagle,
        Sarven Capadisli,
          Rémi Ceres,
Pierre-Antoine Champin,
         David Chaves-Fraga,
    Souripriya Das,
        Daniil Dobriy,
        Enrico Franconi,
       Jeffrey Phillips Freeman,
        Fabien Gandon,
      Benjamin Goering,
        Damien Graux,
        Adrian Gschwend,
          Olaf Hartig,
      Timothée Haudebourg,
           Ian Horrocks,
         Gregg Kellogg,
          Mark Kim,
          Jose Emilio Labra Gayo,
           Ora Lassila,
       Richard Lea,
        Niklas Lindström,
      Pasquale Lisena,
        Thomas Lörtsch,
       Matthew Nguyen,
         Peter Patel-Schneider,
        Thomas Pellissier Tanon,
          Dave Raggett,
     Jean-Yves ROSSI,
         Felix Sasaki,
          Andy Seaborne,
          Alan Snyder,
        Stuart Sutton,
         Ruben Taelman,
           Ted Thibodeau Jr,
       Dominik Tomaszuk,
       Raphaël Troncy,
       William Van Woensel,
       Gregory Williams,
         Jesse Wright,
       Achille Zappa, and
       Antoine Zimmermann.

Ignoring the added whitespace, which user records do you think are not ordered properly?

[Tpt]

Perhaps @Tpt could weigh in?

W3C is doing things properly and handling my two words last name "Pellissier Tanon" well.

[labra]

It is wrong in my case. It should be first name: "Jose Emilio" and last name: "Labra Gayo"

[afs]

@labra What does your W3C account look like for the two fields:

Given name (Required)
Family name (Required)

[labra]

@labra What does your W3C account look like for the two fields:

Given name (Required)

Jose Emilio

Family name (Required)

Labra Gayo

[gkellogg]

It is wrong in my case. It should be first name: "Jose Emilio" and last name: "Labra Gayo"

It appears to me that your name sorts in properly (after Mark Kim and before Ora Lasilla). What you're seeing is that your names aren't split as you would expect, due to the simplistic nature of formatting; the code only splits after the first name, as it doesn't have independent knowledge of where the split should occur.

@TallTed had suggested aligning names, even though it is only white space in the source HTML, which may make it easier to look at the source, but is impossible to align as you would expect given the loss of information.

I maintain that the main thing is that each name appears in the proper order, not what the source formatting looks like. Perhaps the only change we can make is to not try to format the source at all, other than by putting each name on a separate line. But the way things stand, the text is presented properly in the formatted document which is all that should really matter.

[TallTed]

Given that the API output being used to produce the HTML is known to produce a correctly family-name ordered list, I'm OK regardless of how the extra white space I added to the HTML is treated, as that addition was purely to aid in manual ordering (because the list I started with had multiple incorrectly ordered names).

I do note that ROSSI is all-caps here, but is initial-cap in the current list of WG participants. I maintain (as I commented elsewhere) that initial-cap is appropriate for the participant lists in the documents, however this is produced.

[afs]

ROSSI is the form appearing elsewhere on W3C pages. So it looks like the user has input their name like that.

[TallTed]

The previously linked current list of WG participants is a W3C page.

This link will go directly to Jean-Yves Rossi (not ROSSI) in that list.

@JyRossi — Please comment!

[gkellogg]

The API still returns Jean-Yves ROSSI, so @pchampin will need to work with the apps team to see what's going on. It should take it from the user record, but if it was changed recently, there might be a caching issue.

[pchampin]

It seems that @JyRossi's family name in the W3C database is all uppercase. I guess that there is some post-processing in the WG's participant list...